Reviews of Catz

 

Terrible - only just cleared the boundaries of what I would call offensive, and only then because we've had a lack of submissions! Don't let him get away with this short sighted anti-animal propaganda!!! (Here at Cats-Tales we are not prejudiced against persons who have a negative attitude toward the animal kingdom.) Sez It is a favourite grumble of mine that a lot of people writing poetry these days are apparently indifferent to its music. If a poem's substance is sufficiently poignant, polemical, or confessional, then the sound of the words themselves-chant and chime and assonance and resonance-seems hardly to matter. Well, here's a strikingly musical poem which courts the ear no less than the eye. He lures the reader with his melodious if sometimes difficult conceits into a surreal emotional landscape: "I would use it like a mat." And: "we don't have a real fire." Most of the poems in this collection are similarly lush with imagery. This is a savage and funny diatribe launched by the writer's seeming fear of animals. Here the voice is human rather than instrumental, rising and falling not all that far from the reader's ear. I wish more of the poems on this site revealed the elusive "I" as on this page. Powell's image-painting is just dazzling, but here and there the vital expressive spark seems at risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer richness of craft. Ed Rackstraw First thoughts were that this poem was not acceptable for printing. Being open minded however, I began to look further into the phrasing and realised that somewhere in this work there is the memory of a child. The rhyming takes the reader back to infants school and first reading lessons. The sudden logic that a real fire is needed to make a log necessary seems to be when the writer jolts himself back into the reality of today and his adulthood. Maybe Mike Powell will submit further work which hopefully will show us his true potential without offending our senses at all, I do hope so. The review by Ed Rackstraw was excellent, wish I could word myself so succinctly. Judy Munday I like this. We have a cat (one of many over the years) and every one of them seemed to use us as a mat in their strangely superior way. Cat, Mat. Dog, Log. Fire. The poet needs to surprise us. David Gray